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Instagram Begins Testing NFTs This Week

The social media giant will initially allow only a handful of selected creators to share NFTs on its site.

Sarah Lord Writer
Sarah Lord covers TVs and home entertainment. Prior to joining CNET, Sarah served as the tech and electronic reviews fellow at Insider, where she wrote about everything from smart watches and wearables to tablets and e-readers. She began her career by writing laptop reviews as an intern and subsequent freelancer at Tom's Hardware. She is also a professional actor with many credits in theater, film and television.
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Instagram will experiment with NFTs in the coming days.

 Sarah Tew/CNET

Instagram's foray into NFTs begins this week. The Meta-owned company will work with a few US-based artists and collectors who will be able to share their NTFs on the platform, Instagram said in a tweet on Monday.

The photo-sharing social media platform plans to start small with NFTs, according to Instagram chief Adam Mosseri.

"Now I want to acknowledge up front that NFTs are all about distributing trust, distributing power. But Instagram is fundamentally a centralized platform, so there's a tension there. So one of the reasons why we're starting small is so that we can learn from the community, " he said in a video posted on Twitter. 

NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, are digital assets that are verified using blockchain technology. They've have been in the works at Meta for a while -- CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke about the possibility of bringing NFTs to Instagram during his talk at SXSW in March. 

"Over the next several months, [you'll get] the ability to bring some of your NFTs in, and hopefully over time be able to mint things within that environment," he said at the time. 

NFTs can be a part of a collection or standalone pieces of art. It can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase a single NFT from popular collections like Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, while sales for rarer NFTs can end up in the millions. 

Sports leagues like the NBA and MLB are also selling NFTs of highlights and player cards. Last year, NFT baseball cards were sold for as little as $5 a pack, but this year the price went up to $25.